Cliff May over at FDD:GREAT EXPECTATIONS: Bernard Lewis, the foremost living scholar
of the Islamic world, writes that Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and other Islamist
empire builders had long expected that defeating America

would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was
certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a
whole series of attacks -- on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S.
troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on
the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen
in 2000 -- all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the
dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places. ...

The
response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice,
came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack
on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq
indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision
of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was
necessary.

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse
inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that
their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a
little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are
right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences -- both for
Islam and for America -- will be deep, wide and lasting.

Comments

America: Thank the Dhimmicrats

Cliff May over at FDD:GREAT EXPECTATIONS: Bernard Lewis, the foremost living scholar
of the Islamic world, writes that Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and other Islamist
empire builders had long expected that defeating America

would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was
certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a
whole series of attacks -- on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S.
troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on
the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen
in 2000 -- all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the
dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places. ...

The
response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice,
came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack
on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq
indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision
of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was
necessary.

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse
inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that
their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a
little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are
right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences -- both for
Islam and for America -- will be deep, wide and lasting.